Photofunia and Green Screen: Put Your Videos and Photos Just About Anywhere!

My friend Tricia Fuglestad @fuglefun shared with me that she uses the Photofunia app on her Art Room iPads to put her student’s art in magical places. She simply has them insert a solid green background in place of a photo and then edit in the DoInk Green Screen App. This got me thinking, how could I take my green screen projects a step further?

Using the Photofunia app is pretty simple. It is available via a browser or as an iPad or Android app. Caution, there are a few of the image options that aren’t entirely kid-friendly, but nothing graphic or too horrible. In fact, because it is free, the worst part of the app is the ads that pop up on the screen. If you can avoid those, the apps goodness is amazing!

To begin using the app, choose from more than nearly 600 effects. They are continually adding new effects to the app, so visit often. For example, I knew that I wanted to find some fun ways to highlight my Green Screen book, so I downloaded the cover image and started playing with the app. Depending on the effect, there is more or less cropping. I loved seeing my book popping up all over the world from Tokyo to New York. Here are just a few of the fun images I created.

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I couldn’t believe how lifelike the images were. It was as if my book truly was being advertised all around the world. I especially love the goat version, where the goats were eating my book advertisement. Some of the effects create gifs and those are especially lifelike. I’m not sure how it works, but I know it would have taken me months to recreate the effects in Adobe Photoshop.

I started to think about how I could combine multiple layers of video to create even more complex creations. This week on the #greenscreenbookslowchat the theme is ‘float and fly.’ I and others are sharing fun ways we help our students defy gravity. I shared a bunch of my quick and easy tricks. (Side note: I learned how to combine several gifs into one again via my friend Tricia. I used Apple Keynote and then exported the video. The last step was to import the video into EZGif editor and create looping videos like what you see below.)

I thought I would try another challenge. I wanted to create a skydiving image of myself, but I didn’t have the gear. So, I mashed up Photofunia with another app I really like Superimpose. I added a picture of myself to the skydiving effect on Photofunia. It uses an automatic face detection feature to put your subject in a skydiving pose:

As it is, I think it’s pretty amazing. But I didn’t want just a static image, I wanted to create a video or a gif image of me skydiving.

Next, I downloaded some clouds from Youtube. and imported both the image of me skydiving and the clouds into DoInk. I really liked the result. One extra cool feature of the Superimpose app is that you can save the final result as a jpeg or as a png. The png can be imported into other apps and it has a transparent background.

But I wanted to try one more thing. I wanted to import this video into another Photfunia creation. I especially love the gifs that are created on Photofunia. Not all of the templates do this, but the ones that do are really cool. So, first loaded a solid green background to the template to create a built-in green screen.

Then I imported the video of me skydiving and the above video. A little pinch and zoom in DoInk and I inserted myself into the green screen made by the sign.

The finished gif shows movement both of the city street and the skydiver.

So there you go. With green screen, you can put yourself just about anywhere. There are just a few ways to make yourself fly! Have fun!